Texas City Model Train Festival, November 5 - 6, 2016

We spent about 5 hours on Friday afternoon setting up the layout. We received a lot of help from members of the club that has their layout on the second floor of the Texas City Museum! They not only helped with unloading the modules from the trailer, but also with set-up. So why did it still take us 5+ hours to get the layout set up? Well, when we turned the DCC system on, only the passenger main line worked, partially. The freight line was shorting. There were some odd behaviors in the system, and measurements didn't make any sense. We finally called it a night. Saturday morning, at about an hour and a half before opening time, Rusty had brought his DCC system. After swapping out the units, the layout still behaved the same way. He had also brought his DC (analog) power pack and throttle, as a worse-case scenario. With about an hour to go, we decided to remove the wye from the layout (its electronics requires DCC and doesn't work with DC). With some help, we pushed the two halves of the layout two feet closer together, and went to work on getting it all working. At 12 minutes before show opening time, we decided to try the electronics again, and for some bizarre reason, it worked perfectly. So, we then hurriedly put our trains on the layout. Luckily the audience didn't start coming in until about 15 or 20 minutes after opening time, so we had trains running when they walked in. This first photo shows the final set-up that we used.

Bob is enjoying his grapes for lunch. This is the outside-of the-layout viewpoint. We pulled the wye modules out of the layout, and replaced it with a 6-foot module. On the opposite end of the layout, we pulled Don's two-foot module, so that we had the matching 6-foot distance there. By leaving the wye modules intact, and pushing them against the back of the mountain module, we created the illusion of a 4-foot deep scene. It worked surprisingly well.

After our initial scare of not having functional electronics to run trains, both Saturday and Sunday the layout worked flawlessly. In this photo Don is running Rusty's passenger train, as Peter's battery-powered freight train passes by.

Saturday was a beautiful day and lots of people attended the Texas City festival. There was a lot of outside activities, including the landing of a helicopter in the parking lot behind the building in which we were set up. There was a constant influx of audience members until closing time. Sunday, however, was not so good. Texas City only had the special attractions on Saturday, so there wasn't much going on outside on Sunday. We were speculating that there may have been maybe 20 or 30 people that came in to see the layout on Sunday!

Here's another view of the double-layer scenery with the wye in the background.

We had a few new items to show at this show. Tom Henderson, of Sidetracks, donated an American Model Builders tower kit to the club. Peter built it in time for this show, so that we now have a way of protecting the wye's track. The trees shown on the wye were also new for this show.

Here is a close-up photo of the new "Henderson" tower, as shown posing on Peter's home layout. The structure is set on a plexiglass base. This provides a nice diorama scene, allows for the incorporation of interior lights, and protects the building itself while it is stored in a box in between shows. The basic construction is finished, but now some extra detailing and weathering need to be applied to the structure and the scene before it is finished.

Bob picked up this kit at the 2016 NASG Convention. The odd thing about this kit is that it had no markings as to who was the manufacturer of the kit. Comparing it with known structures listed on the NASG web site's Product Gallery showed no matches either.